


the sound of trumpets

by orphan_account



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Criminal Behavior, Happy Ending, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Kinda, M/M, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:03:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8007253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'll protect you," Hamilton says.</p><p>-</p><p>There's a crime and a trial, and a Laurens trying to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sound of trumpets

Hamilton rolls his wrist. Cracks it. He looks lazy.

Laurens wants to take his wrist between two fingers and squeeze it. He wants to burn his fingers into Hamilton’s skin. He wants to bruise him. He wants Hamilton to blink, and stop, and look down, and realize he’s bleeding. He wants Hamilton to realize he’s human.

The judge bangs her gavel, and court is adjourned, and suddenly everyone is standing. Laurens gets to his feet, too, because he’s not sure what else to do. He doesn’t move. He watches, as the lawyers lean over to whisper in Hamilton’s ear, as the rest of the public files out of the chambers. The orange looks very strange with Hamilton’s skin tone: disquieting, uneven. Laurens doesn’t know what to do.

Hamilton looks over. Their eyes meet. Hamilton quirks an eyebrow. Hamilton doesn’t see him.

Laurens swallows hard and turns away.

He doesn’t need to be here.

-

Hamilton turns himself in on a Thursday.

He gets drunk beforehand. Not that Laurens would know - that’s just what Lafayette told him. He got drunk with Hamilton, and then Hamilton said there was somewhere he needed to be, and he gave Lafayette directions, and they ended up at a police station. And Hamilton said goodbye. And Hamilton went inside. And turned himself in.

(They’d had his picture on the news for a whole week, before that - not a real picture, more of a half-drawn sketch from the bartender, who saw Hamilton, who saw Lee, who saw the blood. There was no sketch of Laurens, for some reason Laurens doesn’t understand.)

Laurens takes great care to think of him as ‘Hamilton’, now. He didn’t get a note from Hamilton. Didn’t get a goodbye.

If he calls him Hamilton, it’s easier for him to forget he knew him. If he calls him Hamilton, it’s easier for him to forget everything.

-

Charles Lee dies two weeks after Hamilton turns himself in. Internal injuries, Laurens hears, though the paper just says he died after being beaten by a mugger, which. Isn’t entirely untrue.

Mulligan comes over the day before Hamilton is due in court and says, “You know he’s only trying to protect you. He’s only ever wanted to protect you.”

Laurens sits on the couch and stares at the TV. He can see Hercules in the reflection of the TV screen, but he’s distorted, dulled. It’s easier to look at him like this, because Laurens can’t see the look in his eyes and remember how much he fucked up.

“I didn’t ask him to,” Laurens says, and Mulligan sighs, heaves himself up from the couch just to come over and clamp a hand on Laurens’ shoulder.

“Sometimes we don’t need to ask,” he says, and he leaves, and all that’s left is a couple empty beer bottles and a dip in Laurens’ couch.

Laurens tries to convince himself he imagined it, but he goes to bed that night, and he closes his eyes, and he sees Alex with blood on his hands, sees Alex, so calm. _It’s going to be all right, I’m going to protect you,_ and he sees Hercules in the reflection of his TV screen, hears _he’s only trying to protect you_.

Laurens thinks prison might be better than this.

-

Laurens doesn’t want to go to court but he goes anyway, because Hamilton probably didn’t want to turn himself into the cops, but he did anyway. There are some things you do for people you love.

Used to love? Love? Laurens doesn’t know anymore.

On the third day, they show photos of Lee the way he was when the paramedics found him. There’s blood all over his face, and Laurens knows some of its Hamilton’s just like he knows some of it’s his. One of his eyes is practically gouged out. Laurens closes his eyes when they show the body shot.

Hamilton doesn’t flinch. Laurens doesn’t know if that’s good or not.

“He was _massacred_ ,” the prosecutor says, yelling above the din of protests. “Isn’t that true, sir?”

It’s struck from the record. Laurens looks at the jury. They don’t look like it’s been struck from the record.

Laurens thinks, _Alex, what have you done._

He leaves before the day is done. Hamilton doesn’t look at him.

-

The thing is, Lee had started the fight. He was the one who had a problem with Alex and Laurens kissing in the bar, not the other way around. He’s the one who leaned over their table and said _meet me out back, faggots,_ with breath that smelled like rotten cherries and beer. Alex and Laurens - they just responded.

Lee swung the first punch, too. Hit Laurens square in the jaw, and Laurens had to push Hamilton back so he could go at him, himself. Kicked him in the stomach. Jaw. Pushed him hard enough that he went back against a broken pipe. Stuck him through the stomach, like a pig.

Laurens puked when he saw that. Hamilton cleaned it up, best as he could, but said, _the cops won’t know. Drunk people puke back here all the time. They’re not going to trace it back to us._

Laurens had blacked out after that - he didn’t pass out, but he doesn’t remember much. He doesn’t remember how he got home. He just remembers coming to in the bathtub, under pink-purple lights, and Hamilton’s face so close, his eyes, so wide. There was a drop of blood on his nose.

Laurens remembers praying that he dreamed the whole thing.

He remembers Hamilton’s voice: _It’s going to be all right. I’m going to protect you._ So calm. Always so calm in a crisis.

Laurens bites his tongue.

-

Twenty minutes after Laurens learns Hamilton confessed, he’s at the police station himself.

“Please, sir, I need to see a detective,” Laurens says, and the receptionist holds up a finger. “I’ve committed a crime, and I’d like to confess,” Laurens says, and she keeps the finger in the air. “I’ve committed a murder.”

She hangs up the phone.

The detective Laurens meets with is harsh, at first; he holds himself in a vaguely threatening manner, and his voice is grating, like the grinding of a train’s wheels on its steel tracks. Cold.

“I am here to confess to the murder of Charles Lee, sir,” and the detective raises an eyebrow so high it nearly reaches his hairline.

“Is that so,” he says. “Well, we already got the guy for that, sonny. I’m sorry, but whatever you were looking for, I can’t give it to you.”

Laurens lungs crack like glass in a fire. He feels hot all over. “I’m serious, sir,” he says, but he must sound insincere, or something, because the detective just pats him on the shoulder, leans down, and says, “Go home, son,” all father-like, like Laurens didn’t just commit to murder, like Laurens is a twelve year old boy who stumbled in looking for trouble.

The detective goes back to his desk. Laurens tries the front desk again, but the receptionist is on the phone, and she makes vague shooing motions in his general direction.

He goes outside, and sits on the curb, and tries to remember what it felt like to not be guilty.

-

Every Wednesday night at 7:10 pm, the phone rings.

Laurens makes sure he’s always in the house. He likes to hear it, because for a moment, he can pretend - it’s just Hamilton, calling from school, calling from work. Calling to hear Laurens’ voice.

He picked it up, the first time, and he heard the drone of the automated voice: _An inmate is calling from Staten Island Penitentiary_ \- and that word, _inmate_ , almost made Laurens puke.

He hung up the phone. He didn’t pick it up, after that, just sat on the couch and listened to it ring out.

-

Eliza stops by the night before the last day of the trial.

Laurens almost doesn’t let her in, but then she says, _please, John,_ and her voice sounds dry and cracked, and he’s not sure if he can make it worse. He buzzes her up.

She perches on his coffee table. She keeps glancing around, and Laurens doesn’t have to look to know her gaze keeps landing on Hamilton - the pictures by the TV, the old sweatshirt on the kitchen counter, the shoes by the door. Laurens couldn’t quite bring himself to move them.

 _It’s going to be fine, John,_ she says. She sounds earnest, poor thing. _It’s going to be fine. It was self-defense. He was just defending himself - that’s what the jury will think, anyway. It’s almost true, isn’t it?_

Laurens wants to peel his skin from his bones. He wants to crack his skull so he can give his brain some room to breathe. He wants to stop existing.

 _I guess,_ he says, and Eliza kisses him on the forehead.

 _It’ll be fine, John,_ and Laurens wonders how many years he’ll pay penance for this, how much time he’ll spend in Hell or Purgatory or this fucking apartment, with Alex’s shit all around him and a weekly phone call he can never bring himself to pick up.

-

On the last day of the trial, Laurens can’t bring himself to get out of bed. He lays there, staring at his popcorn ceiling, and wonders whether he could switch places with Hamilton if he tried hard enough. He closes his eyes. He knots his fingers in the sheets. He thinks, _please_.

He opens his eyes and he’s still in his room.

He wants to puke, but he’s so desensitized that his stomach can’t even muster up the energy to turn.

 _New life,_ he thinks, and drags himself out of bed.

He gets up late enough that he’s late to the courtroom, and it’s locked when he gets there. Probably for the better, he thinks. He’s not sure what he’d do if he were in there.

Confess again, maybe. They’d laugh him out of court, probably. Maybe lock him up for interrupting, whatever the fancy word for that is. Laurens has forgotten it.

He sits cross-legged on the floor outside the courthouse. There’s a bench, but he doesn’t need it, leaves it open for people who actually deserve a place to sit. Laurens swirls his finger through the dust on the tile floor, making patterns. It’s absentminded. He finds himself making letters, once - _ALE_ \- and he forces himself to stop.

At 1:48 in the afternoon, five hours after court goes into session, the courthouse doors open.

Eliza is out first. She looks dazed, her gaze half blank. “Eliza?” Laurens says, and she looks down at him, but she doesn’t seem to register him sitting there. Laurens thinks of Hamilton, the blankness of his gaze in the courtroom, like he was looking through Laurens, instead of at him. Like Laurens was made of plastic.

The lawyers come next, and they’re talking, and they’re huddled together, and Laurens can’t tell if its good or bad. He pushes himself to his feet, slowly, because he thinks, _if Hamilton can go to jail, I can stand to hear about it. I can stay upright._

And then Hamilton walks out.

And he’s not in handcuffs.

And Laurens’ heart feels like it’s made of soft fabric, and its crumpling.

Hamilton looks over at him. Hamilton blinks. “Hi,” Alex says. He looks good. He looks proud. He looks like he’s falling apart, right in this moment, like the second he saw Laurens the bomb went off. The shrapnel hit him.

Laurens feels like he should be stumbling, but his steps are strong. He practically wraps Alex up entirely against him when he reaches him - he’s so _small, so small, so small,_ feels like he got smaller while he was away, like he couldn’t eat, and his bones feel brittle through his suit, and his skin looks like it’s flaking this close, and Laurens thinks _Alex_.

For a moment, Laurens thinks Alex isn’t going to hug him back.

Then Alex wraps his arms around Laurens’ waist, and he tucks his face into Laurens’ neck, and Laurens feels him shake, a bit. “ _Alex_ ,” Laurens says, and Alex bites his neck. “You fucking idiot.”

“I got off, didn’t I?” and Alex’s voice sounds very fragile, this close. Laurens runs his thumb over the knob of Alex’s hip.

“Don’t fucking do that again,” Laurens whispers, and Alex doesn’t say anything else. He bites Laurens’ neck again.

-

(Later, Alex tells him that the closing argument was that Alex and Lee could have been going in the back alley to fuck. They revisited the testimony of the owner, who said people “got off back there a lot” and said he was probably killed by a homeless guy, or a junkie, who went crazy on acid or shrooms.

Laurens laughs when he hears it. He kisses Alex’s shoulder, and leaves his chin resting there. “Genius,” he says, “except for the part where you turned yourself in.” Alex shrugs.)

-

(Even later, Lafayette tells him that Alex paid the night club owner off. “To say you weren’t there,” he says, and Laurens stops talking to Alex for a week.

Then he trips over a pair of Alex’s boots he left in the middle of the hallway, and Alex runs out yelling, “Sorry, sorry!” and Laurens kisses him so hard they fall over. They start talking again, then.)

-

(They never go back to the nightclub.)

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from the voltaire quote: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” (i know its about kings and war but, eh, i'll just warp it in my mind so it makes sense to me.)
> 
> let me know if there are any errors/typos/etc. that i need to correct!


End file.
